New Edmonton theatre, new Teatro season, new comedy

When you're launching the new theatre that has arisen, rather marvellously, from the mould, pestilential vapours, and good times of the old, "audiences shouldn't be seeing a play they've already seen." Stewart Lemoine is firm about that.
For The Love Of Cynthia, opening Thursday at the beautifully reconstructed Varscona Theatre, is all about "celebrating the newness of the experience," says Teatro's resident playwright of the new comedy that opens Teatro's five-show summer season.

There’s Teatro La Quindicina logic for you. When you’re writing a comedy to officially launch the new theatre that has arisen, rather marvellously, from the mould, pestilential vapours, and good times of the old, “audiences shouldn’t be seeing a play they’ve already seen.” Stewart Lemoine is firm about that.

For The Love Of Cynthia, premièring Thursday at the beautifully reconstructed Varscona Theatre, is all about “celebrating the newness of the experience,” says Teatro’s resident playwright of his new comedy, which opens Teatro’s five-show summer season. Not that new plays are “a (wild) stretch for us,” as Teatro artistic director Jeff Haslam points out. “After all, we are a new-play company.”

There are always Lemoine premières in every Teatro season. And there’s always new talent: casting invariably includes members of Teatro’s ensemble of veteran stars plus promising newcomers.

And so it is with For The Love Of Cynthia, set in motion when a provincial census-taker in 1956 stumbles upon a tiny kingdom — “the size of a small farm,” says the playwright — just west of Drayton Valley and south of Lodgepole. Those Alberta co-ordinates, incidentally, are not fanciful: the real Cynthia is a hamlet, not a girl. “When you drive to Jasper, the distances to Cynthia and to Lodgepole share a sign,” says Lemoine. He was sufficiently struck by this cohabitation to introduce a character named Cynthia Lodgepole into his 2003 comedy Caribbean Muskrat.

“A new theatre in the capital of Alberta (cries out for) a new play,” says Lemoine calmly. The local setting of For The Love Of Cynthia isn’t unprecedented in the Lemoine canon. “We have a history of exploring Edmonton and environs in a way that’s evocative,” grins Haslam, thinking of such plays as Cause and Effect, which happens along the remarkably unremarkable retail stretch of Gateway Boulevard. Or Mrs. Lindeman Proposes, set in Jasper National Park. Or Saint Albert, set in the suburban burg of a similar name. Lemoine’s annual New Year’s play, this year called An Invitation to a Map, was set on an acreage just outside Picture Butte.

The return of the 36-year-old company from its year-long exile across the street at The Backstage Theatre is a housewarming of a particularly dramatic sort. Since the new Varscona stage is bigger, deeper and a lot less problematic for sight lines than its sliver-moon-shaped predecessor, “we wanted to populate it,” says Haslam, who’s a member of a 10-actor cast for the season-opener. The only theatre in town where you might see more actors in a show next season is likely to be the Citadel.

“We wanted it to be a celebration!” says Lemoine. “Theatre is about big groups of people in a room!” says Haslam.

The casting predated the play, usual practice at Teatro, where Lemoine custom-makes plays for specific actors: five newcomers, five recognizable Teatro stars” led by Ron Pederson as the king of Cynthia and Haslam as the Chancellor of the Interior. “Of what?” someone asks the latter in the course of the play. “Of everything!”

Ben Stevens, who plays the young census-taker, and Paula Humby, both a couple of years out of theatre school, are rising stars of the local scene. Fresh out of MacEwan University are Michelle Diaz, Adam Houston and Morgan Donald. A sense of multi-generational continuity infiltrates proceedings: the latter is the daughter of Varscona veteran Paul Morgan Donald, Die-Nasty’s musical director.

And then there’s the old-style theatrical romance of a red velvet curtain. “In this play, it’s part of the storytelling,” Lemoine says of “the possibility of having downstage scenes in front of the curtain … You can open it and reveal something that people haven’t been seeing for half an hour.” Says Haslam: “anything could happen when someone calls ‘Curtain’!”

In its very bricks, the new Varscona, a theatre made exclusively for theatre, is old-school — “a new theatre that feels like an old one,” as Lemoine puts it. So is the new play. For The Love Of Cynthia is an heir to the vintage screwball tradition. To get himself in the groove to write, Lemoine watched the one Preston Sturges screen screwball comedy he’d never seen, Hail The Conquering Hero. He loved it. “A preposterous situation that everyone is buying into: he has a way of selling that. And framing a big group of characters.”

The 1936 Moss Hart/George F. Kaufman comedy You Can’t Take It With You was an inspiration, too. As in that classic ensemble piece about a family of eccentrics, and the outsiders who stumble upon them, For The Love Of Cynthia has “a hapless young person who discovers a whole world that’s functioning and shouldn’t be,” says Lemoine. “The census-taker is the way in.” Haslam calls him the Groucho Marx character.

“I’m excited to get to work in the new theatre,” says Lemoine. “We’re learning the bones of the place, and the equipment. It’s not the culmination. It’s starting. We’re just breaking it in.”

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